


The Other Houses

by Taabe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 12:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9384341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taabe/pseuds/Taabe
Summary: Salazar Slytherin is on a hunt for things of power. But the houses we rarely hear about have power no one suspects.





	

Heili shut and sealed the door and turned with her hand closed. Even in her greenhouses, where she had never been afraid, she was afraid now. God, let Sal go on seeing no farther than the compost on her hands. She needed all the shade she could get.

She stepped into the light in the tower room. With her free hand, she signed in Ro’s birds’-wing language: _We need to talk._

Ro had looked up at the sound of the door, but she had said nothing. She signed back: _Wait._ She lifted the cymru from its stand and plucked its single string. The note hung in the air. Heili felt it settling over the windows like caulking. Sal was tone deaf. So Ro had been building protections too. 

Sal might decide no council between women would be worth the frustration of trying to decode it, Heili thought. She wouldn’t bet on it. She dropped to the rug, facing Ro, with her hand still closed. Even if Sal could see into the tower, he could not see through her gloves. They were made to blunt slow-growing malice even longer and slower than his. She had strengthened the reflective glare on her greenhouses too. 

_How much longer can we hold him off?_

Ro rubbed her forehead. _Who knows?_

 

Sal had bound the three of them by some bastardized knock-off from the covenant they had sworn when they founded the school. He had argued, then insisted, that they leave some portion of their strength in a lasting form. To protect the school, he said, when they were gone. 

Godric called it a waste of time. Heili and Ro thought it dangerous. They had set protections to keep any one house from overthrowing the rest. Those protections were keeping them alive now. Sal could not control them or kill them outright and survive the backlash. But he could weaken them. And objects could be stolen, horded, misused.

But the compulsion grew. It would drive them out in time. And if they did nothing, and Sal left some object concealed here for his successors to use, they would still have failed. 

_We have hundreds of years to think of._ Heili swiped at her face and left mud on her cheek.

The geas had grown until it scored them, like holding breath under water. To apportion power as Sal demanded would come near fracturing the soul. It would set some beating heat of theirs outside their will. Power without guidance could shake atoms out of alignment. A body could reshape to contain power — could reshape power — could set up variable systems to govern it. A thing was too straightforward. Power within a thing grew too concentrated and single-minded. Even a cup, a splint, a spoon would be a weapon if they made it a repository.

_Like hell,_ Ro had said to her, the night Sal made the first demand; _I wouldn’t give him an heir, so I’m supposed to give him a ring?_

They had refused, and she knew it would cost them. She could not see into a future in which their houses met with scorn, and even the books forgot their names — when Heilagr Hoflatrpassia, daughter of health, passion and measure, dwindled into the wheeze of a badger, and Rowena Branwynn, the White Raven, became by deliberate mistranslation Branewin, the Raven’s claw. But she could see enough.

Ro heaved her hair back in both hands. _You asked me once what we could do if we could seed a spell in a fir cone and let it mature in heartwood for a thousand years._

They had been walking together in the woods, gathering shelf mushrooms and beech burs. Heili remembered. She had introduced Ro to the centaurs. At Yuletide, Ro had returned the gift. Heili had entered the hall and stared up at the converging sightlines of falling snow: the whole arched roof dissolved into sky. They had stayed awake together until the stars burned through.

Heili held out her gloved hand, half-open. The object in it glinted like a talon in the mud. A seed like a spine. She closed her hand over it.

_If it has a soul already,_ Ro signed, _can you mix with it?_ Her hands brushed, trembled.

_It’s all I can think of to try._ Heili spread her blunt free hand. _He does not believe that a bound soul can remain whole._

The house elves said one could. She thought of the first summer, after the students had left, running across campus with a butterfly bush in her arms. She talked to plants, steadied them at germination, twined them out of the ground. She had told Ro that she moved like plants, at a slower speed than most people. 

Godric had told her she could grow runner beans up her arms. He had wanted her to come with him on his latest dash to wherever. He was helping her take in the flax harvest, stripped to the waste, his chest all over grass seed. Blue flax flowers made the grass brighter green.

“It’s vacation!” He hurled a bale into the loft. “You need a break from this place. You never get away.”

She’d laughed, brushing broken clover off his arm. “I might forget the way back.”

“Not you. You have direction in your bones.”

“Nah. Phototropism.” 

He threw an armload of grass at her. 

 

_You’re afraid to try._ Ro’s hands clenched each other.

_That’s why I’m here._ Heili’s hand drooped on her knee. _Conduits are your job._

Ro charted red shift and old musical notations. She was studying the lays of Antrim shepards and blind bards of the Jutes, to keep their patterns somehow intact. 

_Is that all?_

Her nails stung. Heili brushed her hand away.

_I work outdoors._

Heili looked up at her, lean in her linen shift, and knew she would never have asked Godric, not if he had set up a forge in her onion grass. He was good for a hand when he could sweat for a morning, lifting heavier and heavier bales, setting himself against tonnage. She’d called him Eric the Red since July. She had not seen him since Sal had come to dinner wearing that black ring with a glint as flat as a snake’s eye. 

She leaned forward, balling one fist against Ro’s shoulder.

_I only feel safe outdoors. You never come out of here, damn it!_

But Ro had understood how a hall that seated 500 could shrink in when it held only four — and had given her the breadth of the roof for a skylight. She rested her head on Ro’s knee, watching Ro’s hands. They were shaking.

_You may be right._ One hand touched Heili’s hair and hopped upward. _He may not have thought that there are different ways to impregnate an object._

_What will we lose?_

Whose thoughts would she think afterward? Would they have the pace of cellulose? She could think of only one way to try this that did not leave her too terrified to open her eyes. Ro picked up Heili’s free hand and looked into it, as though she could read leaf mast. She formed letters on the palm.

_You want me to fertilize you?_

Heili cupped her hand over Ro’s. _I want you to sleep with me._ She flicked the short words, enjoying their plainness. Her gut tightened. She felt heavy, the warm drawing down of earth over her ankles, air sweet with wild lily of the valley. She had signed it looking up. Ro opened her mouth. Heili pulled off her glove and put her fingers to Ro’s cheek, her jaw.

_I. want. you._

Ro closed her eyes, her cheek against Heili’s hand. She leaned back, flushed, her shoulders shaking. She was laughing, soundlessly, helplessly. She felt Heili’s short hair, her eyes, the dent in her chin. 

Heili straightened and dropped warning fingers over Ro’s mouth. Ro kissed them but opened her eyes. She kissed Heili’s palm.

_I should have asked you. All the times I’ve wanted to. I should have asked._

Heili took the seed from her gloved hand. She lifted her shirt and pressed the seed to her navel: a line of shadow along a fold of skin. She took off the glove and then her shirt.

They stood holding hands — a firm, sunburnt redhead, and a long dark musician with calloused fingers, standing outside the light from the window. Ro felt the neck of the cymru, and without lifting it, once again she flicked the string.

It made no sound this time, but Heili felt the vibration, felt it in the soles of her feet and the backs of her calves, felt it seeking over her skin. 

She felt it taking in their silences. The silence of Ro’s hands flat against her hip bone. The silence as they slid arms around each other, like easing into lake water early in summer. The silence as Ro touched fingertips over her spine, writing _you’re here._ The deep stillness in her when Heili answered, _I have wanted you since the stars,_ and she tightened her grip until it hurt, the laughter shocked out of her. 

Their soundless breath in each other’s mouths. Her forehead on Ro’s damp shoulder, her eyes damp against Ro’s collarbone, air moving over clean cotton. The urget hollowing. The silent shout in the palms of her hands. Expanding beneath her as they lay, forehead to forehead, and she thought of nights she had sat on the floor in this room, too late for crickets and too early for birds, looking into the fire as Ro set down the gittern, the oboe, the only music preserved from Andalusia. Their grip tightening, slowly, shutting out the air between them. 

 

They sat shivering below the window. Ro leaned around her and spread her fingers against the string. Heili felt the vibration still. She had given Ro, too, her vessel, and it would be safer in Sal’s hand than a fretless fiddle. He would think the cymru could not play, because he could not hear it. He would never play that vibration. She did not need to fear the mind who could. 

Hemlock needles prickled her skin, the soft young needles of May. However her own skin stiffened, she could recall them at will. As Ro could strum all her life, she thought, as she could see that the blossom set every year when the seed grew to flower. If she planted it in her lifetime. Or it could lie dormant for centuries, like the redwoods that seeded themselves in fire.

_Play that one again?_  
_This summer —_  
_Yes?_  
_Remember the blackberries we picked with the centaurs? Take me there again._  
_You said they scratched, last time. You said you’d never go back without a sweater._  
_I’ll go barefoot, and I won’t say a word._

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this some time ago, before the last book came out, when we knew the houses each had a thing of power — and I wanted to know what two women of power would do if they needed or wanted to make an heirloom. I was sure they'd come up with something more original than a sword. And I was tired of hearing the two houses run by women always ignored or dismissed. I also wanted to take their names seriously.
> 
> The A03 did not yet exist when I wrote this story, so I shared it with friends. Here's the note I wrote at the time: I'd pronounce Heili like Hayley — though I don't know much about old English. And I know Rowena's an anglo-saxon name, really, not Welsh. Then again, there's precedent. Arthur isn't a Welsh name, but he was a Welsh legend. Anyway, enyoy!


End file.
